by Oren Harman
60. Hamilton, Narrow Roads, 172–73. Hamilton wrote to a friend at the time that he hadn’t yet thought deeply about Price’s covariance equation, “apart from seeing how it provides just the key I was looking for in about 1962 when trying to get the ideas of social selection into mathematical form as simply as possible.” But Hamilton sensed nonetheless that the covariance equation “may be something like the introduction of Fisher’s idea of analysis of variance into statistics.” Hamilton letter to Colin Hudson, July 26, 1970, GPP.
61. W. D. Hamilton, “Geometry for the Selfish Herd,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 31 (1971), 295–311; George Price letter to Al Somit, July 20, 1969, GPP; George Price letter to Aunt Ethel, July 30, 1969, GPP; George Price letter to Ludwig Luft, July 22, 1969, GPP.
62. George Price letter to Annamarie Price, November 11, 1969, GPP.
63. John Maddox letter to George Price, February 11, 1970, BLWHC, Z1X102.1.1.2.3; George Price letter to Edison, April 19, 1970, GPP.
64. George Price letter to Ludwig Luft, June 8, 1970, BLGPC, KPX1_1.6; The paper was revised and sent to Science as “The Nature of Selection” in December 1970 and rejected again. It was published posthumously, through the efforts of Steven Frank, in the Journal of Theoretical Biology 175 (1995), 389–96; George even wrote to Shannon on October 16, 1969 (GPP), to ask whether he thought the covariance equation could be interpreted “in terms of information channel capacity.”
65. George Price correspondence with Al Somit, March 5, 1969–May 20, 1970, GPP; interview with Al Somit, April 16, 2008.
CHAPTER 10: “COINCIDENCE” CONVERSION
1. Bill Hamilton letters to George Price, December 5, 1969, January 11, 1970, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.5, and BL:KPX1_4.13.
2. J. H. Morris, assistant editor at Nature, letter to Bill Hamilton, April 10, 1970, KPX1_10.6.2; W. D. Hamilton, “Selfishness and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model,” Nature 228 (1970), 1218–20.
3. George Price letter to J. B. Rhine, September 10, 1971, GPP; George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, December 10, 1970, GPP.
4. George Price letter to Edison Price, October 23, 1970, GPP.
5. George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, December 10, 1970, GPP. In fact Anne returned to London with her friend Rickie, though George later claimed that she had written the letter in such a way so as to hint that she’d be alone, a fact that had gotten him excited, even though she would claim that he had misinterpreted her.
6. George Price letter to Dr. Gilfillan, July 1, 1972, GPP; George Price letter to Henry Noel, August 11, 1970, GPP.
7. George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, May 27, 1970, GPP.
8. George Price letter to Henry Noel, July 13, 1970, GPP.
9. George Price letter to Dr. Gilfillan, July 1, 1972, GPP; George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, December 10, 1970.
10. “A History of All Souls Church at Langham Place,” booklet distributed at the church.
11. George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, December 10, 1970, GPP.
12. George Price diary 1970, GPP.
13. Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a Leader (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1999). In a November 30, 2004, New York Times editorial, “Who Is John Stott?,” columnist David Brooks cited Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center as saying that “if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose.”
14. When Jim Schwartz spoke with the elderly John Stott in December 1999, he didn’t remember George but said that it was quite possible that he’d forgotten, and that All Souls “got a lot of kooks.” I thank Jim Schwartz for this information.
15. Class of 1944, Triennial Report, Harvard University Archive (HUA), 273–74; Class of 1944, Ten Year Report, HUA, 209–10; “Harvard Alumnus Renounces U.S.,” Boston Traveler, February 17, 1948; “Citizen of the World Detained by French,” Plainfield Courier-News, November 17, 1948; “News Briefs,” Dallas Times-Herald, November 18, 1948.
16. Henry Noel letter to George Price, July 7, 1970, GPP.
17. Henry Noel letter to George Price, July 16, 1970, GPP.
18. George Price letter to Henry Noel, July 27, 1970, GPP.
19. Henry Noel letter to George Price, July 16, 1970, GPP.
20. George Price letters to Henry Noel, July 27, August 9, and August 12, 1970, GPP. Henry didn’t particularly appreciate being lectured by George. “Please be so good as to lay off for a while,” he wrote to him in November, and the correspondence broke off temporarily.
21. George Price letter to Anne Sheffield, December 10, 1970, GPP.
22. Ibid.; George Price letter to Julia Price, October 13, 1970, GPP.
23. Ibid.; George Price letter to Henry Noel, August 11, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Howard Klevens, December 18, 1970, GPP.
24. Bill Hamilton letter to Edison Price, February 15, 1975, BLWHC, Z1X102_1.1.20; Bill Hamilton letter to Colin Hudson, July 26, 1970. I thank Janet Hamilton for sending me this letter.
25. Interview with Janet Hamilton, October 24, 2007.
26. Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, July 2, 1970, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.8.
27. George Price letter to Louis J. Vorhous, December 18, 1970, GPP.
28. George Price letter to Caroline Doherety, August 9, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Marie Lynch, October 14, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, October 19, 1970, GPP. Somit was actually not all that surprised by either development. “I had been expecting the former given the devotedness of your atheism…. As for the latter development, I had perhaps been prepared for it by the strength of your expressed anti-Semitism.” Al Somit letter to George Price, December 2, 1970, GPP.
29. George Price letter to Caroline Doherety, August 9, 1970, GPP.
30. Communication with Kathleen Price, March 8, 2009; “Guest List: Kathy’s 21st Birthday,” GPP.
31. George Price letter to Rosemarie Hudson, August 29, 1970, GPP.
32. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, September 21, 1970, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.9.
33. Edison Price letter to George Price, September 11, 1970, GPP.
34. Rosemarie Hudson letter to George Price, November 21, 1968, GPP; George Price letter to Julia Price, October 13, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, October 19, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Ludwig Luft, November 4, 1970, GPP.
35. George Price letter to Rosemarie Hudson, August 29, 1970, GPP; Rosemarie Hudson letter to George, undated (circa end of August 1970), GPP; George Price letters to Rosemarie Hudson, October 23 and 25, 1970, GPP.
36. George Price letter to Annamarie and Kathy Price, November 7, 1970, GPP.
37. George Price letter to Kathleen Price, November 30, 1970, GPP.
38. George Price letter to Rosemarie Hudson, October 25, 1970, GPP.
39. George Price, “The Twelve Days of Easter,” manuscript dated March 7, 1971, GPP; George Price letter to Dr. Gilfillan, April 4, 1971, GPP.
40. George Price letter to Dr. Lukas Vischer, April 22, 1971, GPP; George Price letter to the Reverend Alan N. Stibbs, January 18, 1971, GPP; George Price correspondence with Jack Finegan, January–February, October 1971, GPP; George Price letter to F. F. Bruce, July 5, 1971, GPP. A reply from the World Council of Churches arrived in May, promising, somewhat unconvincingly, that the “paschal problem” was “on the agenda.”
41. Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, April 15, 1971, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.10.
42. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, May 3, 1971, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_5.9.
43. Bill Hamilton postcard to George Price, May 5, 1971, GPP.
44. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, November 15, 1971, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_5.3.
45. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, July 29, 1970, BLGPC, BLKPX1_2.7.
46. George Price letter to Annamarie Price, July 15, 1971, GPP; ibid.; Revelation 13:18 reads: “this calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.” George mentions a number of times in hi
s letters that he had cracked the true meaning, but not once what it actually was.
47. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, op. cit.
48. Fisher first presented the theorem in his classic 1930 book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. But he repeated it in “Average Excess and Average Effect of a Gene Substitution,” Annals of Eugenics 11 (1941), 53–63, and in the second edition of The Genetical Theory, published in 1958.
49. J. F. Crow and M. Kimura, An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); J. R. Turner, “Changes in Mean Fitness Under Natural Selection,” in Mathematical Topics in Population Genetics, ed. K. Kujima (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1970); O. Kempthorne, An Introduction to Genetical Statistics (London: Champan and Hall, 1957); A. W. F. Edwards, “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection,” Nature 215 (1967), 537–38.
50. George R. Price, “Fisher’s ‘Fundamental Theorem’ Made Clear,” Annals of Human Genetics 36 (1972), 129–40, quote on 140. To see how George’s covariance mathematics prepared him to understand Fisher’s theorem, see Appendix 3.
51. George Price correspondence with Henry Morris, June–October 1971, GPP; John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1961); Matt Schudel, “Obituary: Henry M. Morris, Father of ‘Creation Science,’” Seattle Times, March 5, 2006.
52. George Price letter to Henry Morris, September 10, 1971, GPP.
53. George Price letter to Henry Morris, October 10, 1971, GPP.
54. George Price letter to Rosemarie Hudson, undated, circa February 1972, GPP
55. George Price letter to Ludwig Luft, August 8, 1971, BLGPC, KPX1_1. 6.
56. This includes gene interaction, for even two respectively “fit” genes (here defined as the “environment” one of the other) may interact so as to produce fitness degrading effects.
57. George R. Price, “Fisher’s ‘Fundamental Theorem’ Made Clear.”
58. Warren J. Ewens later published a similar conclusion to George’s: “An Interpretation and Proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection,” Theoretical Population Biology 36 (1989), 167–80. I thank Warren for extended communications over Fisher and the true meaning of his fundamental theorem.
59. Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, November 28, 1971, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4. 15.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid. The article Hamilton had read was Richard Levins, “Extinction,” in Some Mathematical Problems in Biology, ed. M. Gesternhaber (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1970), 77–107.
62. George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, March 14, 1972, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4. 11.
63. George Price letters to Joseph Rhine, December 19, 1970, April 4 and September 10, 1971, GPP; George Price correspondence with Hugh Ross, July, 1971–March 1972, GPP.
64. Joseph Rhine letters to George Price, December 29, 1970, and April 13, 1971, GPP. For a history of the psychic and parapsychological movements see Mauskopf and McVaugh, The Elusive Science.
65. Joseph Rhine letter to George Price, November 22, 1971, GPP; George Price letter to Joseph Rhine, December 19, 1971, GPP.
66. George R. Price, “Apology to Rhine and Soal,” Science 175 (1972), 359; Price-Rhine correspondence, January–October, 1972; last quote from letter dated October 19, 1972, GPP.
CHAPTER 11: “LOVE” CONVERSION
1. Randall E. King, “When Worlds Collide: Politics, Religion, and Media at the 1970 East Tennessee Billy Graham Crusade (Appearance by President Richard M. Nixon),” Journal of Church and State 39, no. 2 (1997), 273–96; George Price letter to Billy Graham, September 1970; reply from assistant to Billy Graham, September 24, 1970, GPP.
2. George Price letter to Annamarie and Kathleen, August 2, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, August 13, 1970, GPP; Michael Simpson letter to George Price, July 25, 1970, GPP.
3. Al Somit letter to George Price, December 2, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, December 12, 1970, GPP.
4. Al Somit letter to George Price, February 8, GPP.
5. George Price letter to Al Somit, September 11, 1971, GPP.
6. Al Somit letter to George Price, October 12, 1971, GPP.
7. Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. On Lorenz, his co-Nobelists, and the history of ethology, see Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
8. Lorenz eventually published his theories on animal fighting in book form in On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1966). The assumption of the wide prevalence of nonviolent ritualized combat has since been softened—animals, it seems, escalate conflict more than was previously suspected.
9. John Maynard Smith, “Equations of Life” in It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, ed. Graham Farmelo (London: Granta, 2003), 161–80, 166; John Maynard Smith, “In Haldane’s Footsteps,” 351. Alongside Lorenz, T. H. Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley also espoused a group selectionist argument to explain ritualized combat: See J. S. Huxley, “Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 151 (1966), 249–71.
10. R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: John Wiley, 1958).
11. R. C. Lewontin, “Evolution and the Theory of Games,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 1 (1961), 382–403; interview with Richard Lewontin, December 31, 2007; on the history of the divide Lewontin alludes to, see James Schwartz, “Population Genetics and Sociobiology: Conflicting Views of Evolution,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45, no. 2 (2002), 224–40.
12. Maynard Smith eventually published The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
13. John Maynard Smith, “Evolution and the Theory of Games,” American Scientist 64 (1976), 41–45.
14. Maynard Smith later explained that he was aware of the “unbeatable strategy” term in Hamilton’s 1967 paper, but hadn’t registered this as influencing his ideas when formalizing the ESS. “In Haldane’s Footsteps,” 352.
15. Ibid.; George Price letter to Richard Lewontin, September 15, 1970. I thank Dick Lewontin for providing me with their correspondence.
16. George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, August 9, 1971, GPP.
17. George R. Price, “Extension of Covariance Selection Mathematics,” Annals of Human Genetics 35 (1972), 485–90. George had recently learned (and acknowledged in this paper) that Alan Robertson had published a covariance selection equation prior and similar to his own in a somewhat obscurely placed article, “A Mathematical Model of the Culling Process in Dairy Cattle,” Animal Production 8 (1966), 95–108. Robertson, however, a researcher more concerned with breeding practice than evolution, had not added the second, transmission term to his equation, meaning that it was not expansible to multiple levels of selection, which was the whole beauty of George’s approach. A few months after George’s own derivation of the equation, the mathematical biologist Joel E. Cohen, then at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, independently derived the covariance relationship (again, without its expansible component) in an attempt to determine whether the differential use of legal abortions by people of varying socioeconomic or educational status had a positive or negative selective effect on measured IQ. It was published nine months after George’s Nature paper as “Legal Abortions, Socioeconomic Status, and Measured Intelligence in the United States,” Social Biology 18 (1971), 55–63. Cohen had derived the covariance from what he took to be “an easy consequence” of the formula for the selection differential published by the eminent Edinburgh quantitative geneticist Douglas S. Falconer, and was therefore not all impressed by either his or, when he learned of it, George’s, originality. See, D. S. Falconer, “Genetic Consequences of Selection Pressure,” in Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability, ed. J. E. M
eade and A. S. Parkes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), 219–32. There was a further antecedent to the covariance equation that George was unaware of, once again without the second term: C. C. Li, “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection,” Nature 214 (1967), 505–6. I thank Joel Cohen, now a professor at the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities, for correspondence about this matter throughout May 2008.
18. George Price letter to Frieda (last name not known), May 29, 1971, GPP.